Press Page

Welcome to my press page. Here you can find interviews, reviews, testimonial's etc which I hope you find of interest and enjoy reading.

This is a recent interview I did with BA Media student Josh Tolley for his profile assignment.

"The lighter side to the Dark Lord of Nottingham" Trevor Bamford or the Dark Lord as he has come to be known is a gothic rock musician who has spent most of his life in Nottingham. But where did it all start? I met him recently to ask him how his remarkable career began. So Trevor, when and where were you born and where did you grow up? “Okay, I was born in a little village called Tiddington, just outside Stratford-Upon Avon in 1960” He then went on to explain how he was born just outside of an RAF base as his father worked for the RAF and that he and his family moved around quite a bit when he was younger. “When I was about 4 or 5, my dad moved back to Nottingham and the first house we got was actually in Clifton, not far from the college I taught you at ironically enough” “I spent the first two years in Nottingham, in Clifton, but then I moved to Aspley when I was 7 and spent most of my childhood growing up there in the Aspley council estate and then moved out to Kimberley until I was 21 and left home” he then said.

I wanted to know about his earliest memories with music. He said that his parents’ involvement with it was simply through television light entertainment shows they watched such as the Val Doonican Show, Lulu and the Des O’Connor Show, very mainstream. He remembers thinking “This stuff is music? Well I bloody well hate it, it’s crap!”. As he’s now an experienced musician, Trevor had to have been influenced by something, or someone, if not his parents’ taste in music. He discovered heavy rock/metal music with Black Sabbath and Hawkwind opening his eyes to a whole new world, more of which below. He eventually bought his first electric guitar to the dismay of his parents, who had the attitude that the music he liked was “not music, just rubbish”. It was his first girlfriend who supported him and made him realise “he was being brainwashed” into thinking what he liked was “somehow of less value”. He had found a like mind who supported him and he gained confidence from then on. Eventually he formed his first band when he was 20 or 21. His parents at that point in his life, “dismissed it all as being somehow irrelevant”. However, over the years, he said “their attitude softened and they became a lot more sympathetic”. I wondered what were the first single and album he bought. The single was “The Wild One by Suzie Quatro” and he played it “about twenty billion times”. The album? “Mott by Mott the Hoople”. It’s still one of his favourite albums, even now. “There’s not a bad track on it”. What are the memories brought back by listening to them both now? “Me being 15 to 16 and learning, listening and being taken somewhere else, to a world that wasn’t Aspley or Kimberley”. Back to his main influences - “I can be very specific about this, two bands, Black Sabbath and Hakwind” He mentioned how those were the bands that really “Turned his life around”. He spoke about why they influenced him so much and speaking about Black Sabbath, he said “Nobody did music like that. Nowadays, every band in the world owes a debt to Black Sabbath because they were pioneering music in c standard and the music was heavy. It was low, it was deep and their lyrics, subject matter. Black Sabbath were the darkest thing in music, full stop” Regarding Hawkwind and why they influenced him so much “Hawkwind by counterpoint were a space rock band and I was very much into science fiction and horror, which you can basically put down to Black Sabbath and Hawkwind. So really for me, I was looking for music that sang about other things other than he loves, she loves, they love, they can walk hand in hand” He said that there’s nothing wrong with those sorts of songs “But I wanted songs that were a bit more deeper and a bit more gravitas, more so, I wanted the music to take me somewhere and one thing Hawkwind definitely does is take you somewhere” He explained that Black Sabbath and Hawkwind were how he got interested in playing music and how he bought the Sabbath album Masters of Reality and the Hawkwind album Doremi and thought “I reckon I can do this”. He said that he’d already tried learning to play the guitar when he was 14 and gave up because he wasn’t really interested in guitars as such “But when I heard that, I wanted to play that kind of music” That was nearly forty years ago, so what bands is he currently in? His answer was that he was in two main bands at the moment, “One would be Arcane Winter and the other would be Death Party UK”. He added that one of his bands Death Party UK had just released a new single and that he and both Death Party UK and Arcane Winter were working on an album to be released later this year by early summer. To conclude the interview, I asked where he saw himself in five years’ time music-wise. “The music I play for Arcane Winter and Death Party UK is very physical and one of the concerns I have and everybody has is that when they get older, your muscles get tired” He then went on to say “I do worry that I’m not going to be able to physically play the music that I’m playing now”. He added finally that he’s doing “As much now as I can because what I’d like to see in five years time is me continuing” Let’s all hope his album is a success and that ‘The Dark Lord’ keeps on making music for the foreseeable future. Profile piece by Joshua Tolley 21/1/15